Welcome

Welcome to Josh Baker's Practical Advice for Optimizing Your Internet Marketing blog. Here you will find internet marketing optimization and online strategy articles full of tips, tricks, discussions, and thoughts to help you take your marketing and business to the next level of success.

Properly Setting Up Excluded Placements Inside Google AdWords

Do you advertise with Google AdWords? Do you have your Google Adwords paid search ads show up on their Content Network? Not sure what that exactly means?

Google allows you to not only display your ads in Google’s search results pages when someone performs a search on Google, but also on sites that use their Google AdSense program to automatically display paid search ads that are relevant to their website copy – although many times it’s not always relevant – but which makes this post relevant to you!

You can set up lists of sites or domains that you do not want your Google AdWords ads to show up on via the Excluded Placements section (found in the Networks tab of the new Google Adwords interface). By viewing the detailed stats of your ads on these sites, assuming you have your conversion tagging set up to show AdWords conversions correctly (surprisingly many put it on the wrong page) you can determine if your ads that are appearing on specific sites on the content network are profitable or not for you.

If not set-up properly though, you may be surprised to find out that your ads are still appearing on sites that you thought you had banned through the Excluded Placements section in the AdWords interface.

Unless you specifically want to ban just a certain subdomain such as www.about.com, or marketing.about.com, but want your ads to appear on other subdomains of their website, you need to enter in just about.com. Entering in the root domain (about.com) without the third level (www, marketing, etc.)you will be successfully banning the entire domain not just that specific third level entered.

For more detailed information, you can view Google AdWords help section on setting up Excluded Placements.